On Monday we will be discussing First Person. You should read the essays (and accompanying responses) by Murray, Eskelinen, Moulthrop, Jenkins, Zimmerman, and Douglas & Hargadon. Post your comments/thoughts/rumminations below.
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What a breathe of fresh air! Of all the theoretical works we’ve read thus far, this collection of short arguments made by far the most sense to me. Perhaps it’s because the authors laid out their concepts in the simplest of terms but I really enjoyed this text.
I was particularly taken by Stuart Malthrop’s essay “From Work to Play” and his ruminations on how the struggle over open code would become a major battlefront as the war on terrorism continued to unfold. He couldn’t have been more on target. Nearly seven years since September 11, 2001, America as a nation remains at a heightened state of alert. People are constantly debating how far is too far when it comes to invading somebody’s privacy and under what grounds should it be allowed.
Like Malthrop, I wonder how these questions will play out. Will we end up living in a society like that portrayed in 1984, where everybody’s constantly watched and free speech is all but banned? How will the continuing degrading of our privacy impact the internet and digital worlds? Will we have more or less freedom on the Web? It seems counterintuitive that we’d have less privacy online, where people go to be people that they’re not and live out fantasies they’d never reveal to strangers, but digital worlds aren’t immune to wiretapping and hacking. Will people continue to reveal themselves in this way if society becomes more and more Big Brother-ish? What price are we willing to pay for digital privacy? Is digital privacy even achievable?
At what point do producers worry about profit over replayability of a game? I find Murray’s essay quite telling in that she seems to think that the drive behind a game comes from the story it involves. “For me, it is always the story that comes first.” (p3) That sounds like a rather one sided argument, Janet. I can think of plenty of games that don’t have a story that are still fun to play simply because of the mechanics and/or challenge involved. And, in many ways they are just as “fun” as very immersive games. I like Loyall’s response to Murray’s essay. I’m not sure I agree with him on the role of Interactive Drama though. There is something going on here below the surface that Murray and Loyall do not touch on. There are players, readers, gamers, etc. that enjoy different forms of interaction. Some people enjoy a more passive experience and others a more immersive and assertive role. “Storytelling is a core human activity,” says Murray. Though, so is problem solving … yet neither is as dependant or independent as it seems Murray feels they are.
Her response made me chuckle. She boils down Loyall’s response to a battle of labels and says her main focus is on production. The last sentence in her essay does not seem very proactive. She still is focused on just story and game. In all actuality there is much more at stake than those two genres. What about the inherent characteristics found in cyberdrama independent of story and game?
I am about to delete FireFox from my computer. It has been the spawn of the devil for the past few weeks. Please disregard the previous post. I wish there was an edit button. Many apologies for the mess. The following is the intended posting:
Immediately I noticed (and stuck with me) is this necessity to discuss EA’s, formerly Maxis, The Sims game in the articles. As a Sims nerd, I could spend pages writing about all the things wrong with these articles depictions of The Sims (and the few things they got right). With Murray and Eskelinen in particular, but with every article, it felt that the writers were wanting =one great game to come along and define ‘new media.’ But is this the best approach? When Murray spoke of The Great Train Robbery the big breakthrough for movies (pg 5) it made me feel unsettled. While we, as humanity, may focus on the one catalyst, it is never one object that starts the revolution. You have to wade through all the bad movies, the Nickelodeon for you kids, before you get to that one good one, and even then you will possibly remember the bad movies more so then the good one.
While they praise The Sims, they neglect all the “bad” hypertext that prowls the internet (I’m discarding the notion of who decides what is good and bad to keep it short and sweet). In order for us to understand what makes something good, we need to see what is bad. The lack of the “bad” in the articles questioned the creditability, to an extent. We can not hope for an immediate utopia with new media. There will not be this one great artifact to define the genre for a while (I’m betting). Why are we dismissing everything else being created? As much as Murray wants us to produce more, she is stuck in a ‘perfect world’ frame of mind and focusing on the “good” games.
Aside: The Sims was never meant to be an ostentatious narrative, where the user creates a story. It is an elaborate program for architects, i.e. a building simulator. Give that a think. lol
I am writing on the article by Stuart Moulthrop: From Work to Play: Molecular Culture in the Time of Deadly Games
Hmmm…gaming is outside my comfort zone as to what to post about. This article, specifically the section that talked about “Do not immerse” (65-67) seemed to find the potential of gaming as a bad thing needing to, “insist upon the difference between play and interpretation, the better to resist immersion. Any analogue of literacy for interactive media would probably need to encompass such resistance.” (66). Sounds like gloom and doom to me. Like TV is going to rot your brain out and desensitize you to the outside world. Games seem to provoke the same breech of security we have about the world.
Can books, music, TV, movies, games just be, nothing more nothing less, just something people like, consume and put down at the end of the day? This section talks about Pokemon stealing my account information… I am not worried about Pokemon – as I am too busy worrying about real people doing that every day.
I am more concerned with the physical world not so much the potential danger of the virtual world. I have hard enough time dealing with what one might call reality. Games for me right now are just that, things other people do usually for fun. Humans really do not like change and this section in the article seemed to be uncomfortable with the fact that video games, I guess are playing more and more of a role in our lives. Some people can build the case that VG are a threat to society and other can build the case that they help with hand/eye coordination. You pick…
A theme we might ascribe to this week’s readings is a search for affordances. As Janet Murray says, “story telling and gaming have always been overlapping experiences.” The various authors are searching this “game-story” space to tease out the useful and repeatable elements that make computer games fun. This seems as much a study of human nature as it does about digital narratives – what draws us to experience stories, to repeat stories and to value stories. Douglas and Hargadon come close to the elusive answers quoting Roger Schank, “schemas are the building blocks of information processing, a cognitive framework that determines what we know about the world, the objects it contains, the tasks we perform within it.” Stories, it seems, is an innate survival mechanism that helps us model the world while paradoxically providing escape from the drudgery of surviving. It might seem that our very nature requires some play; a complete absence of play is certainly an element of drudgery. We know that a prolonged state of depression will have physical repercussions; one might conclude that some amount of play is essential to sustain a healthy life. As Moulthrop observes, “The subject of play is inherently troublesome in a postindustrial or neo-Taylorist regime, even without economic troubles or terrorist threats.” Part of Moulthrop’s essay seems to say if it is worth doing it is doing well. So we struggle with the game-story concept, attempt to define its affordances and its rightful context within the pantheon of media and genres, perhaps as Moulthrop proposes, as if on a mission for world peace. The computer-powered media holds such potential promise and condemnation. Ubiquitous first person shooter (FPS) games power so much of the industry, and they are fun to play, but can we credit them with building bonds between people of different nations, would we expect someone from one of our many current war-zones to empathize with this pleasure? Might narrative imbue gaming with a higher quality of play, be inspirational and be more fun? Is it possible to supersede the FPS such that we come to regard such games as quaint archaic enterprises in the way we today regard the game of Pong? I think it is possible, and more likely to happen if open-source platforms continue to make it possible for experimentation outside of the military-industrial complex (had to get some conspiracy theory in here somehow
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I found this book to be very readable and direct to the point. I specifically enjoyed Jenkins definition of the various narrative structures and Zimmerman’s definitions of interactivity.
However, there doesn’t seem to be any conclusion to the ever popular question, can video game players experience narratives in video games. There seems to be a continuous conflict between ludologists and narratologists in how to define the stories in the game. Ludologists sees video games as a form of interactive entertainment where narratologists believe video games to be a form of narrative structure that has adapted to this highly immersive medium.
The common agreement is that video games are both interactive and immersive and there will be no decisive winner to the arguement.
I do enjoy Moulthrop’s idea of us living in a molecular society. Much like video games, we are able to create,modify, manipulate and distribution various forms of digital media. Producing digital video for YouTube and writing blogs on Digg are a few examples.
Back to the narrative versus interactivity quandary in video games. I am a big of lover of the Final Fantasy series and I thoroughly enjoy both the interactivity and the narratives. In fact, my whole purpose of playing the Final Fantasy games is to move on to the next storyline of where it will lead me. I am totally immersed in exploration, battles, social interaction and the occasional recreational activities. Final Fantasy also offers the players options in choosing to do side quests and monster hunts. Now isn’t this an example where narrative is possible in video games? If Stuart Moulthrop and Janet Murray played this game, maybe they can agree to disagree. Either way there is alot to be researched on. It’s kind like the old question, what came first, the chicken or the egg? We may never know.
I enjoyed this read. It wasn’t too over my head, and it felt nice to see many of the other works we’ve read in class cited in the text.
I’d like to discuss Douglas and Hargadon’s “schema” concept a little bit more. They quote linguists and psychologists’ use of schema theory, defining schemas as “building blocks of information-processing” (p. 194).
Is this schema theory built on assumptions only? I understand that the theory involves this sense of cognitive building blocks, but it seems to be limiting in scope to base every story on some, “Oh, this sounds like so-and-so” assumption. What if the story changes, thus challenging the predictability of the schema? Does it take on another schema, the “plot-is-changing-and-now-it’s-all-over-the-place” schema? Maybe I’m totally missing the point here. I’d like to discuss schemas vs. themes in narrative.
Henry Jenkins says he’s offering a middle ground between the ludologist and narratologist camps in “First Person,” and what he suggests sounds remarkably like an ARG. Jenkins says, “The goal should be to foster diversification of genres, aesthetics, and audiences, to open gamers to the broadest possible range of experiences” (120). That description could apply equally to an already existing ARG. A gamer mindset meets loosely written story and, through “play,” leads to increased production. Maybe Adam Brackin’s presentation is still fresh in my mind and I tend to lay his information over what we read this week, but the entire Jenkins essay could apply to Brackin’s research.
And Jenkins isn’t alone. Bryan Loyall’s response to Janet Murray (3) describes what he is working on in terms of an acting troop playing roles for individual experiences, which looks like an ARG in the making. Stuart Moulthrop says in his essay that “Eskelinen … has proposed hypothetical games where players manipulate data gathered from external reality, or where game elements intrude into real space” (66). That sounds like an ARG to me.
In his essay, Jenkins goes on to say that “a discussion of the narrative potentials of games need not imply a privileging of storytelling over all the other possible things games can do…” but “if game designers are going to tell stories, they should tell them well.” I would agree with this to the point that game developers should employ in-house writers to keep stories coherent if they decide to use narrative in games, but side with the ludologists when I think of gaming and narration not requiring each other. Twitch games have nothing to them, but Pop-Cap sells tons of them. Everquest II has a huge back-story from the first EQ, which pulls from classic literature, but not all gamers know or care about the story beyond what they make happen through their own in-game experiences. If game developers must be storytellers, why not allow the players to create the story? Why not just give a quick starting point and let the players develop the fictional (or not-so-fictional) world?
Is there any reason we have to fall into an either/or camp? Either we are ludologists or narratologists, but we can’t do both. The impulse to pick a side in “First Person” seems a little short sighted. Wouldn’t an alternative be to allow every genre of game do what it does best, even if that is to let the player create the game?
First Person
There are many valid points made throughout the essays collected in the book, some of which we have encountered previously in some way or another in the other texts discussed in the class, but perhaps, since in this case, each author has a limited set of space to use (and they have all used their space very well), the concepts and ideas communicated are much clear and approachable than in any of the other books referenced. Also, the mechanism of allowing responses within the essays is quite useful to obtain a greater perspective on a determinate subject.
Of all the points made, the ones I find more appealing are those that focus on the necessity of continuing to experiment and explore ALL the possibilities of digital narratives (or games, game-narratives, game-stories, cyberdrama or whatever other term they can come up to try to define them, label them or enchain them, depending on which side you choose to take, if you choose to take one)
I especially don’t agree with one general concern raised by ludologists, referring to the application of concepts of cyberdrama to games: “Why focus on things that do not exist, are arguably impossible, and should they ever be created, might turn to be only of marginal interest? Instead let’s focus on computer games, which do exist, are clearly a vibrant aesthetic and commercial force, and seem only likely to increase in importance.” (P. 35 . Introduction to the Ludology section) Therefore, if certain games are only enjoyed by a few people, and are not a commercial force they should not be taken into account? Applying this kind of logic to other scenarios would leave us in a world where only summer blockbusters and the like are relevant and other types of films are left out of the equation. Perhaps I’m exaggerating (perhaps they are exaggerating) still, this seems foolish, not to mention uninteresting. Why choose a side, when you can enjoy both?
Henry Jenkins’ article made the most sense to me of all those we read from “First Person”—his arguments seemed well-thought out and reasonable, whereas I connected least with those of Markku Eskelinen’s (I’m sure this has something to say about me). In terms of the connections between the digital, narrative, and games—one of the things that struck me was his contention that “A discussion of the narrative potentials of games need not imply a privileging of storytelling over all the other possible things games can do, even if we might suggest that if game designers are going to tell stories, they should tell them well” (120). This speaks to something I’ve been thinking about this semester: what kind of digital narratives would be possible if a “traditional literary person” or someone gifted in the use of language and storytelling collaborated with a gifted game designer or someone with technical, digital expertise? Would it be possible to create a work that would provide a richer experience, something both sides would find interesting and engaging? Jenkins makes some excellent points about the role of narrative in a variety of genres from film, to drama, to melodrama, to amusement parks and environmental storytelling—they all use narrative in some particular way, each one adapting or translating the narrative for their own particular formatting needs. Moreover, they all engage someone particularly qualified to work with the narrative such as scriptwriters and dramaturgues and narrative architects, why shouldn’t or couldn’t game designers work in conjunction with someone particularly qualified to deal with the “literary” aspects of the gamestory? One idea that could be interesting would make use of Jenkins’ idea of micronarratives, perhaps in the form of discreet, well-crafted short stories, incorporated into a digital narrative or game, that are complete in and of themselves but that could also be configured together to form a larger work(s) depending on how the game is played. Just a thought, maybe it’s already been done?
I am not sure some of these questions and responses, as they go farther than they need to go, I believe. Moulthroup referenced Donna Haraway as saying we are “moving from an organic, industrial society, to a polymorphous, information system.” We are? When was this article written, 1905, we passed the organic, industrial age some time ago. Can we actually be aware of a, polymorphous information system (multi-state existence of information). We are aware of the multi-states of information and aware that information is progressing at the same time, we know from the scientific method, that in transport matter, from one point to another, the biggest problem is that all matter has to be proxied, that is made quantifiably found, and moved, which is impossible by current scientific methods. I believe the same is true for narratives in that they are “story matter.” We cannot know the multi-possible states of narrative and be aware of its morphing, the narrative would not make sense. I do agree with the Pierre Levy reference to molecular networked intimacy. We are not moving from all states toward future states, we are moving from multi-method narratives, to a convergence of method, a narrative syndication, into the interface of computers.
In Murray’s From Game-Story to Cyberdrama, on page 2, she lists two important structures that “games and stories have in common.” One is contest and the other is puzzle. In the response by Bryan Loyall, there is another structural element listed on page 2: immersion. These are all very good examples, but I believe that exploration should be added to the mix.
In stories, exploration serves, at very least, to define the setting. Some stories have more explicit exploratory elements, where the exploration of an environment by the characters has real effects on the plot. Other stories even center on the idea of exploration, where the plot revolves around the concept.
In games there is always some element of exploring an environment. Here, exploration can overlap with puzzle, as a character may need to solve a puzzle by exploring an environment to find clues. There can also be an overlap with contest. For example, if there is a race it would benefit the player to explore the environment in order to find the fastest route to the end. Lastly, and most obviously, exploration overlaps with immersion. It is difficult to imagine an immersive experience devoid of exploration.
It may be the case that these concepts overlap to such an extent that exploration may be contained within each, and thus unnecessary as an independent term, parallel with the three already listed. Even if that is true, I still think that exploration is important enough to be noted as one of the important structures, whether it is derivative of the other structures or not.
man — if only there was an edit button !